Talk

Infinite City: All Identity Is Local

At multiple locations

Two maps about identity are featured in October. A joint project by Rebecca Solnit and artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña responds to the question "Who am I where?" with a wonderful exploration of the authors' contingent identities and circumstantial memories. "Tribes of San Francisco," by local artist Jaime Cortez, is a cartographic display of vanishing and arriving ethnicities and subcultures that have inhabited San Francisco.

In Pacific Heights, Solnit is "the granddaughter of Trotsky's flag boy," while Gómez-Peña is told he looks like "that member of Santana's band." "Who Am I Where? / ¿Quien soy y donde soy?" examines how neighborhoods, history, and individual institutions work to shape our character, while also extending an open invitation to consider your own geographical identity. Gómez-Peña and Solnit use this piece from the “Contingent Identities” broadside as a point of departure for a night of performative readings from their personal and political cartographies.

In conjunction with Litquake SF, the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast, we celebrate the stories and voices of the Mission and the city at large in an evening emceed by local performance artist Gómez-Peña. Join us in the heart of the Mission for remarkable anecdotes and readings about San Francisco from Solnit, leader of the map project, and other contributors: Shurin ("Monarchs and Queens"), Jelly-Schapiro ("Shipyards and Sounds"), Cortez ("Tribes of San Francisco"), and Camarena ("The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe").